Reviews of Books

providing monoclonal antibodies, and Bettye-Jean Roy for preparing the manuscript. This work was supported by grant RR00168 from the Research Resources Division of the National Institutes of Health to the New England Regional Primate Research Center. Animals used in this study were maintained in accordance with the guidelines of the Committee on Animals of the Harvard Medical School and those prepared by the Committee on Care and Use of Laboratory Animals of the Institute of Laboratory Animal Resources, National Research Council.

Of the several branches of applied linguistics, perhaps the one with the most evident area of application*clinical linguistics*deals with the detection, diagnosis and rehabilitation of language disorders. Born as an interdisciplinary field, clinical linguistics occupies a area of research in which the interests of other well-established sciences (including medicine, psychology and neurology) converge and sometimes seem to collide. None the less, clinical linguistics has become key to the development of practical tools that permit dialogue and cooperation among these various disciplines. The series, 'Estudios de Lingü ística Clínica', edited by Enric Serra and Montserrat Veyrat, in its fourth volume, is a clear confirmation of both the consolidation of a shared discussion space between the diverse professionals interested in language pathology, and the fundamental task of supporting and disseminating the latest advances in the field.
This fourth volume collects ten papers centred, as the title suggests, on three main thematic areas of research in clinical linguistics: 1) the description of the linguistic and communicative mechanisms involved in linguistic deficits; 2) the description and evaluation of children's acquisition of language; and 3) the diagnosis and rehabilitation of patients suffering from aphasias. Most of these papers are the result of investigations carried out by research groups established in the Universitat de València (which has created the corpus PerLA for the study of aphasias), the Universidade de Santiago de Compostela (with the Koiné group focusing on language acquisition) and the Universitat de Barcelona. This research and the volume itself reveal a growing interest in the study of language pathologies in Spain by both linguists and clinicians.
Garayzá bal's paper is representative of how clinical linguistics can help to elucidate long-lasting theoretical issues in cognitive science, such as the allegedly modular arrangement of the human mind, and more specifically, the claim that language is driven by a module independent of other cognitive skills. By reviewing the existing literature and her own research on the Williams' Syndrome, the author concludes that the phonologic, semantic, syntactic and pragmatic deficits shown by these patients, especially in conversational settings, challenge the prevailing hypothesis of a distinct, self-sufficient linguistic compartment. With the same theoretical endeavour, the contribution of Herná ndez, Serra and Veyrat lays the foundation for the study of linguistic deficits associated with the (lack of a) Theory of Mind and the design of programmes of logopedic intervention. In particular, they correlate the symmetrical and non-transitive relation between converse opposites (pairs such as entrar/ salir, vender/comprar, marido/mujer) with the dialogic organization of verbal interaction, where speaker and hearer interchange their conversational roles while presupposing the opposite one.
The corpus Koiné, compiled by the research group with the same name, is made up of the transcription of about fifty hours of video recordings of the speech of seventy-one children. All this material, mostly elicited but also containing samples of spontaneous speech, has been transcribed by an adaptation of the system CHILDES (Child Language Data Exchange System). By using some representative samples of the speech of four children, Ferná ndez-Pérez's article focuses on the assessment of children's verbal resources according to their effectiveness in achieving a successful speech act. The basic issue the author is trying to answer is: what can children do with what they already know? The ultimate aim of this investigation consists in the design of grammars for the initial stages of acquisition and the delineation of parameters that make possible the comparison and the evaluation of particular cases. Both Codesido's and Ferná ndez-López's papers deal with the acquisition of the category of the verb in children's linguistic development. Thus, Codesido compares the performances of eight children distributed into two grammatical stages of development (between 25Á29, and 30Á37 months) and observes the nonlinear but gradual process of consolidation of the predicate. Ferná ndez-López focuses instead on lexical, morphologic, syntactic and pragmatic parameters in order to describe the emergence of the category in fourteen children between two and three years old. Equally interesting are the studies by Otero and Ferná ndez-Casas on the acquisition of combinatorial mechanisms in Spanish and in particular of gender agreement, and by Prego on the communicative function of reported speech in children's discourse as a means to justify their actions, introduce an authoritative voice, and dramatize narrative.
In the last part of the book, Diéguez-Vide and Gich-Fullà spell out the several steps followed in the neurolinguistic diagnosis of a patient with language disorders. Furthermore their presentation may be particularly appealing to those interested in knowing the function that the linguist is expected to carry out in a clinical setting. This article and the following paper, by Cervera and Ygyal, could be considered to make up a unit, this latter being concerned with the therapeutic side of the treatment of aphasic patients. The authors examine the existing methodologies used for the rehabilitation of different kinds of aphasias such as the Melodic Intonation Therapy, which takes advantage of undamaged parts of the brain to perform linguistic tasks. Finally, Rossell's article is devoted to the description of the use of verbs by nine mainly motor aphasic patients in a spontaneous conversation. The author proposes a programme of rehabilitation on the grounds of his own research and the therapeutic principles put forward by both traditional psychology and cognitive neuropsychology.

University of Chicago.
primary obligation of monarchs, then absolute royal authority had been instituted precisely and exclusively to uphold the rule of law. A king therefore was not above the law as the Justinian Code's assertions princeps legibus solutus est and quod principi placuit, legis habet vigorem suggested, rather princeps legibus alligatus, the king was tied to and depended on it. Tyranny, acting above the law, ultimately destroyed the foundations of effectual royal government. Thinkers justifying the sovereign's freedom of action in relation to nothing more than his own will, were countered by others like Juan de Mariana right into the seventeenth century, who emphasized the need to provide justice and sustain authority by obeying the law especially in areas such as contracts and property rights, and natural rights originating in divine law.
The microhistory retold in such fascinating detail by Owens ultimately exposes the weakness of early modern government, rejecting the tendency to read the history of this period in terms of state-building under the Catholic Monarchs leading inevitably to the absolutism of the Habsburgs' global empire in the seventeenth century. It contests the notion that administrative centralization was a symptom of the strengthening of royal authority. By contrast, Owens argues persuasively that no monarch, administration or royal Court ever enjoyed the plenitudo potestatis necessary to exercise determining coercive power in the structuring of the political life of the Castilian kingdoms. The Belalcá zar case suggests that clientage, patronage networks and the court as nexus for trading influence and dispensing rewards, were ineffective administrative tools that ultimately sapped the morale and selfconfidence of those institutions, populated by professionally trained administrators*the letrados*who might actually have been capable of providing monarchs with the consensus and institutional structures to give them the capacity they needed to dominate the enforcement of policy. By permitting aristocratic interference and peopling his councils with grandees again, Philip II undermined the independence and freedom of action of judicial institutions that had been developed under Charles V, turning the clock back to the unsettled period of the civil wars of the fifteenth century when his great-grandparents, Ferdinand and Isabella, had needed to wean the crown away from its dependence on the territorial aristocracy.
The case in question here demonstrates that the attempts of the Catholic Monarchs to counter the preeminence of the grandees in the context of their wars and other fiscal demands failed and they remained fundamentally dependent on the cooperation of their greatest subjects in order to govern effectively. Against the 'metanarrative' of absolutism and the rise of the state, Owens shows how effective royal government depended on the production of broad-based support amongst the commonwealth's diverse leaders and groups, from crown officials, local notables, aristocrats, ecclesiastics, soldiers, municipal councils, and alcaldes. Consent and constitutionalist approaches to the exercise of royal capacity informed all of these groups' understandings of royal authority. The interests of local notables, the urban patriciates on municipal councils, were bound up with the institutional provision of justice and, in this sense, royal actions that enhanced and reinforced the power of judicial administration and institutions like the audiencia rather than revealing the crown's dependence on grandees were necessary to move beyond the limited world of court and royal household. Autonomy from the Cortes and these local forces did not enhance royal capacity; rather, it undermined it, interposing the local grandees with their ability to influence policy through their direct relationship with the king. Dependence would have strengthened the relationships necessary to create broader political consensus and thereby influence the development of political cultures and institutions.
The case that forms the core of this book began in 1444 and 1445, in the midst of John II's struggle against his cousins, the Infantes de Aragón, with the grant of the lordships of Belalcá zar and Hinojosa, municipal territories belonging to Córdoba in northern Extremadura, and the nearby Puebla de Alcocer, a town belonging to Toledo, to Gutierre de Sotomayor in recognition of his military services to the crown. Fuenteovejuna, another town belonging to Córdoba, was seized by Sotomayor's nephew in March 1448. An initial boundary commission investigation in response to Toledan protests led nowhere for the city. However, in his will John II revoked the grants*a revocation confirmed by his successor Henry IV in 1464 and 1465. This immediately preceded a period of intense instability and Isabella's bid for the throne. Toledo only raised the issue again in 1480 when Ferdinand and Isabella had finally come to securely occupy the throne. Another attempt in 1490 was rebuffed, with the close kin of their possessor, the nine-year-old Alonso, grandson of Gutierre, packing the royal council and war in Granada reaching a climax. Hearings finally began in 1495 but were suspended by order of Ferdinand in 1497. Postponements and delays hampered the start of a hearing until another false dawn at the 1518 Toledan Cortes. That subsequent suspension reinforced discontent about arbitrary royal judgments being made at the behest of an influential noble faction or foreign ministers, deflecting royal government from maintaining justice and acting in the interests of the kingdom. Although often seen as revolutionary in character the comuneros revolt's manifesto was an extreme statement of conciliarist thought and actually invoked 'absolute royal authority', calling for its use in reestablishing good governance in the face of corrupt ministers. The movement's failure owed much to the anti-seignorial character that ultimately drove important grandees to side with Charles. In 1523 the trial was reopened and the case referred to the Chancillería de Granada, whose premises were remodelled and improved on the emperor's orders in 1525. The count of Belalcá zar used every delaying tactic in the book, seeking witnesses in far-flung corners of the Spanish empire such as Peru, then refusing to pay the salaries of those chosen to gather the depositions in question, leaving them stranded and penniless on the other side of the world. Considerable time was consumed deciding on the impartiality of the oidores, since it was hard to find judges without any connection to either party in the case. One of the officials involved in the case was accused of corruption, accepting bribes and intimidating a witness, and was duly convicted and imprisoned. A verdict finally found in Toledo's favour in 1536. The case hinged on the reading of 'absolute authority' in the context of rebellion and whether and in what ways it was justifiable to expropriate property. The crown possessed lordship over all property and goods within the kingdom but solely in order to ensure their security and title from outside invasion or internal lawlessness. On appeal, the jurist Pedro Nú ñ ez de Avendañ o in a brief for the Belalcá zar family argued that property could be legally expropriated by the crown as long as appropriate compensation was made. Despite these arguments, a second verdict for Toledo again confirmed their legal title in 1555. Unfortunately, the right of 'second supplication' was immediately invoked and accepted by the regent Juana, who referred a final hearing to the Council of Castile. In 1568, nearly a century and a half after the initial beginnings of the case, the Council, dominated by a faction headed by Philip's favourite Ruy Gómez de Silva, prince of Eboli, with close links to the Sotomayor family, reversed the earlier legal decisions and found in favour of the counts of Belalcá zar. This decision was widely believed to reflect the resurgence of aristocratic meddling in judicial affairs and was symptomatic of the weak leadership of Philip II in the face of the succession of crises that beset his reign.
For literary historians and devotees of political philosophy, after the wealth of minute detail about the case and fascinating insights into the law and workings of its institutions in the early modern period, there is also a summary of how perhaps one of the greatest fictional achievements of the Golden Age, Fuenteovejuna, reflected many of the debates about the dangers of unbridled aristocratic power, the exercise of arbitrary authority and how the violation of bonds within the social body led inexorably to rebellion that the case raised. In this play there is resistance, the legitimacy of which cannot be condoned, but, as in the case of Charles V's response in the wake of the comuneros revolt, the failure of justice and tyranny were recognized as the monarch's obligation to redress. Juan de Mariana's De rege demonstrates the vibrancy of a 'constitutionalist' tradition into the 1640s, whose roots have been traced back to the fifteenth century through this legal case, despite the literature of reason of state, that also pointed out the dangers of arbitrary rule. This book offers an invaluable source for the study of legal history and the development of legal institutions, as well as illuminating the historiography and political thought of the fifiteenth and sixteenth centuries in fascinating ways. There are some eccentric moments, such as the favourable comparison of the Granadan audiencia with the modern judicial system in the US, and a refrain about how the ideas discussed are ultimately involved in the justification of the disproportionate share of resources held by a small minority of the population. Nevertheless, this remarkable achievement is a brightly-coloured mosaic, sketching in the competing interests of different groups in early modern Spanish society, their accomodations, the inadequacy of faction in accounting for political actors' decisions, the weaknesses of the state, the complexity of legal systems and their centrality in political debates. Joan Fuster, el mayor ensayista valenciano del pasado siglo, y a la postre catedrá tico de literatura en la Universitat de València, se refería en uno de sus escritos ('El caso de don Miguel' [1975]) a 'los hispanistas a sueldo de universidades norteamericanas, que son individuos capaces de leer lo que se presente: la ú ltima variante del peor manuscrito del má s insignificante poeta carpetovetónico de la Edad Media'. Está claro que Alan Deyermond no encaja de ningú n modo en la categoría de eruditos a que alude Fuster, pero si éste tenía en mente a algú n rimador en particular sería uno de los setecientos nombres que pululan por los cancioneros castellanos del siglo XV. Así pues, algo ha debido de cambiar desde entonces en esa parte de los 'Països Catalans' para que de allí nos llegue un libro como éste, por má s que se ocupe de algunos poetas cancioneriles que han 'tenido mejor prensa que la mayoría' (260). El volumen está formado en esencia por trece artículos sobre la poesía cancioneril hispanomedieval, previamente publicados, precedidos por la hasta ahora inédita lección de investidura como doctor honoris causa por la Universidad de Valencia, 'El bestiario poético en la Valencia bajomedieval', en la cual insiste en su definición de los bestiarios como libros medievales de zoología moralizada. Es un buen aperitivo al resto del volumen, aunque deja cierto resabio la sugerencia de que la alternancia entre coloma y tortra en La vida de la sacratíssima Verge Maria de Roís de Corella pudiera ser vestigio oral (basta acudir a un repertorio como A. Salzer, Die Sinnbilder und Beiworte Mariens in der deutschen Literatur und lateinischen Hymnenpoesie des Mittelalters, para ver que ambos términos eran intercambiables). La colección de artículos en sí se divide en dos partes. La primera de ellas está dedicada a grandes poetas valencianos y contiene cuatro piezas: 'Religión y retórica amatoria en Dança e scondit de Jordi de Sant Jordi', 'De gran nau a aspra costa: imaginería, semá ntica y argumentación en el poema 2 de Ausià s March' y 'Las imá genes del bestiario en la poesía de Joan Roís de Corella', que podrían calificarse de comentarios de texto de tipo erudito, ademá s de otra dedicada a la figura cimera, 'Ausià s March en inglés', donde valora las tres traducciones disponibles (Terry, Conejero, Archer), con críticas de principio hacia Conejero y puntuales a Archer. La segunda parte de la colección, mucho má s nutrida, con nueve artículos, está dedicada a la poesía en castellano. La encabeza 'Baena, Santillana, Resende y el siglo silencioso de la poesía cortesana portuguesa', que a decir verdad aborda má s bien un fenómeno paralelo, la desaparición de la escuela gallego-portuguesa. Es, a mi modo de ver, el ensayo má s importante del volumen. Aunque al inicio de éste se presente a Deyermond como típico representante del positivismo britá nico, lo cierto es que su atención hacia la literatura perdida le puede llevar a posturas má s complejas de lo habitual. En este caso, no sólo se refiere al documentado Livro das cantigas, compilado por el conde D. Pedro de Barcelos entre 1340 y 1350, sino que maneja la hipótesis de otros testimonios no conservados. Siguen dos artículos dedicados a Íñ igo López de Mendoza. El primero, 'Alegorías amorosas de Santillana: estructura, relación y mensaje', considera la vieja idea de que el Triunphete de Amor, el Sueñ o y el Infierno de enamorados forman una trilogía y postula que en realidad se trataría de un díptico donde el Sueñ o habría desplazado al Triunphete, lo cual no parece haber convencido a Rohland de Langbehn en su posterior edición de estos poemas. El segundo, 'Las sirenas, el unicornio y el á spid: sonetos 21, 23 y 26 de Santillana' conjetura que estos sonetos del marqués influyeron en Roís de Corella y Sá de Miranda, lo cual se halla en contradicción con la idea generalizada de que apenas conocieron difusión en la época. El argumento del siguiente ensayo, 'Estructura y estilo como instrumentos de propaganda en Laberinto de Fortuna de Juan de Mena', me parece en extremo discutible. Segú n Deyermond, la base conceptual y estructural del poema sería incoherente y sólo se explicaría por su objetivo propagandístico, aunque dada su lengua latinizante el ú nico destinatario en realidad sería el rey Juan II; en mi opinión, los supuestos defectos son ajenos a la poética de Juan de Mena y la recepción del poema por sí sola es indicio de que estamos ante un planteamiento demasiado estrecho del problema. Después de dos artículos dedicados a otro autor significativo de las letras hispá nicas del siglo XV, 'La Defunzión del noble cavallero Garci Laso de la Vega, de Gómez Manrique' y 'Las mujeres y Gómez Manrique', sigue 'El gusano y la perdiz: reflexiones sobre la poesía de Florencia Pinar'. Me parece, como a Macpherson, que la obra de esta escritora tiende a ser subestimada por Deyermond. Entre otras cosas, su interpretación del gusano como símbolo fá lico (264) no tiene por qué excluir que tal imagen se halle asociada a la muerte, como es habitual en la literatura de la época e incluso deja traslucir con bastante claridad el poema que comenta. Concluyen el volumen 'La micropoética de las invenciones', donde Deyermond intenta ampliar el aserto de Whinnom de que 'la poesía cancioneril es el arte de la miniatura' mediante la aplicación a este corpus de un concepto elaborado por Reckert en sus estudios de literatura comparada, y 'La Celestina como cancionero', donde indica que las poesías que contiene en voz femenina responden a una tradición diferente a las de voz masculina, con funciones distintas en la obra.
Asunción Rallo Gruss has written a study of sixteenth-century Spanish literature which undergraduate students will be able to consult with profit and with ease. The text assumes a reader who is interested but uninformed, and it is followed by a number of appendices that clarify the information it contains: a selection of passages from a cross-section of the works discussed; a list of writers and other historical figures mentioned, with a short biography of each; a time chart of notable events between the birth of Petrarch and the death of Philip II; and a bibliography of the editions and critical writings cited. The only aid missing is an Index.
Her book, however, is much more than a teaching tool, and her fellow specialists will find it valuable also as a work of reference. After considering the history of the term 'Renacimiento', and the various meanings ascribed to it, the first chapter examines the impact of the Italian Renaissance in Castile, paying particular attention to two aspects that have provoked discussion: the antecedents of the Spanish Renaissance in the fifteenth century ('Prerrenacimiento'), and its connections with Erasmianism in the sixteenth. Chapter 2 subjects the word 'humanismo' to the same treatment, and after indicating the centrality to 'el programa humanista' of philology and grammar, it focuses on the humanist theme of the dignity of man, before considering the restoration of classical Latin and its relationship with writing in the vernacular. Then, in Chapter 3, attention turns to the literary and philosophical traditions that the Renaissance humanists revived, three of which are discussed in detail: neoplatonism, neostoicism, and the legacy of Lucian. Chapter 4 traces the development of new genres of writing in Spanish poetry (Garcilaso and Boscá n), drama (up to, but excluding, the comedia nueva), and prose (the epistle and the dialogue). This leads on, in Chapter 5, to the difference made by the printing press: the creation of a market for books and of a new role for writers, as well as the consequences of these developments for certain kinds of writing (informative, religious and fictional). Finally, Chapter 6 considers how sixteenth-century Spaniards saw the relationship between their world and Antiquity: after examining the longstanding debate about the merits of ancients and moderns, it describes some of the ways in which classical texts were assimilated (through imitatio, the collecting of proverbs and apophthegms, the writing of biographies, and the composition of libros de antigü edades), and it concludes by discussing the effect of the Discoveries, and how Renaissance writers came to terms with facts and experiences unknown to the Ancient World.
In each chapter the approach of Professor Rallo Gruss is historical: she traces the development of practices, ideas and literary forms over time. It is also factual: to illustrate her points, she makes reference frequently to works of the time. But she manages to avoid dull lists, and she regularly looks at specific texts in detail. Her comments on such texts are normally well-informed, and based on the findings of current research, which she summarizes succinctly. A number of them, indeed, are by authors whose writings she has analysed at length in previous publications (Antonio de Guevara, Cristóbal de Villalón, Antonio de Torquemada and Jorge de Montemayor), while the section on Spanish Erasmianism draws together ideas set out more fully in her monograph, Erasmo y la prosa españ ola renacentista (Madrid: Laberinto, 2003). Her starting point here is Marcel Bataillon's great work, É rasme et l'Espagne, which she examines critically, noting those aspects of its argument that have been modified by subsequent research, and arguing cogently that Spanish humanist writings cannot be interpreted in terms of Erasmus alone without distortion. Her reservations are well-founded, but it may be said in Bataillon's defence that she does not distinguish clearly between his ideas and their reception. His book was not intended to be a history of Spanish humanism: it began as a doctoral thesis, and, as a good thesis should, it set out to argue a case in response to a specific question (what was the impact of Erasmus in Spain?). So successful was it, however, and so unrivalled in its quality and scope, that scholars since have tended to see the Spanish Renaissance through its lens.
Humanismo y Renacimiento en la literatura españ ola is a remarkable book, and a substantial contribution to our understanding of the Golden Age. Its range of reference, which is wide, includes not only famous works but others that have slid into comparative obscurity (see, for instance, the pages about the treatises on love). One feels that the author has handled and examined the texts discussed at first hand, and this gives her study a freshness and an excitement that a more pedestrian approach would lack. In one respect, though, it fails to satisfy: in its portrayal of the connections between bonae litterae and sacrae litterae. The author makes clear that for sixteenth-century Spaniards the humanist longing to recover and emulate the culture of Antiquity was not incompatible with Christian belief and commitment, and she underlines the fact that among the Spanish Erasmians it was often combined with an illuminist tradition that sought, like Erasmus himself, to renew popular spirituality. There is, however, another element to which she gives less attention: the concern to recover the original texts of the Bible and the writings of the Fathers of the Church, which was central to the humanist culture of Spain from the time of Antonio de Nebrija to that of Benito Arias Montano. This is not accorded the attention it deserves. The sections, for instance, on St John of the Cross (Cá ntico espiritual) and Fray Luis de León (Los nombres de Cristo) highlight the influence on each of Renaissance neoplatonism, but they make no mention at all of the Bible and the Church Fathers. In this area the writings of Marcel Bataillon are a more assured and trustworthy guide. Seventy-two of the sermons Mother Juana de la Cruz ('la Santa Juana') delivered during her mystical trances were transcribed by her companions to form the visionary's principal work, El libro del conorte. Inocente García de Andrés edited the complete Conorte in 1999 (Madrid: Fundación Universitaria Españ ola/Universidad Pontificia de Salamanca), but even obviating the need to consult the original manuscript has not stimulated a lot of critical interest in Mother Juana, the studies of Á ngela Muñ oz Ferná ndez and of Triviñ o herself being notable exceptions. Inspiración y ternura is an anthology of seven sermons with a double focus. On the one hand, it seeks to provide an edition of and a critical commentary on Mother Juana's Marian sermons. On the other hand, its pastoral commentaries are intended to enable modern readers to use Juana's sermons as a springboard for meditation. Obviously, the link between those two goals is Triviñ o's conviction of the continued relevance of the sermons. It must be noted, however, that in Triviñ o's Comentarios it is sometimes difficult to distinguish her editorial/pastoral observations from her account of the content of a given sermon.
While the nucleus of the Conorte was the cycle of sermons delivered during the liturgical year 1508Á1509, Triviñ o argues that supplemental materials were added from later years with the result that some of the extant sermons are actually compilations, probably made by the convent's chaplain, of the transcriptions of two or three sermons. Many of Triviñ o's comments are illuminating. For example, although it was commonplace to describe Christ's Incarnation as his donning of a garment of human flesh, Triviñ o notes that the camisa woven by the Trinity in Mary's womb in the first sermon is a symbol of shared intimacy, for the shift was the garment worn closest to the skin.
Although Triviñ o does not explain the precise source of her text, she appears to follow García de Andrés' edition, but correcting a number of his erroneous readings. However, my spot-checking of the sermons revealed a number of misreadings, and in other cases, I found it puzzling that some of the passages deemed undecipherable by García de Andrés and following him by Triviñ o are actually quite legible in my photocopy. In the sermon on the Incarnation, page 9, 8 up, should read 'casada ni viuda ni corruta'. The section of the manuscript corresponding to page 10, paragraph 4, lines 1Á2, can be almost completely deciphered as 'no le rogaron má s por entonces por no le enojar ni xxxxxxxxx, por lo qual se entiende'. Page 22, paragraph 4, 2 up, should read: 'cuanto a lo que de sí mesma es'. The end of the second paragraph on page 41 can be deciphered as 'quejidos a manera de personas que está n sobre bacines con mucha necesidad y demandan misericordia e remedio de sus penas e no hallan quien se la dé, mas antes les es respondido'. I am reasonably sure that page 43, 4 up, should read 'e las figuras de él figuradas'.
In the Purification sermon page 62, paragraph 4, should begin 'Dejadme, madre mía, que no los quiero escuchar ni oír tempoco. ¿Vos no veis . . .'. I do not believe 'plato' is correct on page 83, line 5, and two words have been omitted. I think the phrase should say 'que todo no se cumpla tan cumplido e rico e abastado'. Line 2 of the next paragraph should be corrected to read 'cuando le rogavan que tornase del agua vino'. I do not think 'libro' (l. 5) is what the manuscript says. Could the word be 'luto'? Page 87, paragraph 7, last line, should read 'fui vuestra compañ era'. The last line on page 92 should read 'le anunció'. In the first complete paragraph on page 93, line 3 should be corrected to 'empero a se empezar a apurar'; 3 up should read 'traspasó su corazón cuando el justo Simeón'. The last line of page 101 of the Visitation sermon should be corrected to read 'entendimientos e salidas por el testamento viejo y por el testamento nuevo'.
These transcription problems aside, Triviñ o's anthology provides a useful introduction to Mother Juana's ever surprising creativity. For example, her Incarnation sermon dramatizes the idiom 'escoger como entre peras', for only the Blessed Virgin can satisfy Christ's craving for 'peras viñ osas'. Mary appears as High Priest in the Purification sermon. In the Assumption sermon she and Christ fly about heaven seated on a throne placed atop a horse. At the beginning of the Visitation sermon Mother Juana takes the jumping lover who peers through the window in Canticles 2:8Á9 and observes how Christ hides himself like a wild goat or a small deer behind the wall of the consecrated host, peering at us through the window of his wounds. In short, this selection of Mother Juana's sermons amply demonstrates the inspiration of the book's title. I hope it will in turn inspire future studies of Mother Juana's unique spirituality. Studies of Don Quixote show no signs of abating, so Jaime Ferná ndez's ambitious bibliography will be of enormous assistance to cervantistas. It hardly needs pointing out either that Jaime Ferná ndez's labours have been immense*over a period of eighteen years he has compiled a record of virtually everything that has been published on Cervantes' masterpiece in seven languages: Spanish, English, French, German, Italian, Catalan and Portuguese. The bibliography covers a period from the beginning of the twentieth century to the early twenty-first, with an addendum to December 2007. During this period the Cervantes industry took off in a major way, and it really is mind-boggling to survey the sheer quantity and variety of output*from impressionistic essays by famous writers to major scholarly monographs, by way of a plethora of journal articles, Actas, Festschriften, and volumes of critical essays. What made Professor Ferná ndez's Herculean task all the more arduous was the fact that the period included two centenary years*1905 and 2005*both of which opened wide the flood-gates, as eulogistic outpourings were added to the steadily rising tide of scholarly publications. One is put in mind of the cynical observation Borges expressed through his Pierre Menard: 'El Quijote fue ante todo un libro agradable; ahora es una ocasión de brindis patriótico, de soberbia gramatical, de obscenas ediciones de lujo', though the bibliographer has mercifully avoided including the latter in his remit. Professor Ferná ndez has done a truly splendid job in organizing this vast quantity of material so as to make it easily accessible to the hard-pressed researcher wishing to focus on a particular aspect of the Quixote. The bibliography, in fact, comes in two parts: the first is a printed record of publications in alphabetic order of authors' names, and this part occupies two volumes; the second part consists of a CDÁRom containing a searchable electronic copy of this printed bibliography, but it is also divided into a 101 'unidades narrativas' (as opposed to chapters), by which is meant novelas, stories, episodes, adventures, notable passages, letters, speeches, dialogues or poems in Cervantes' narrative, as well as the para-textual materials, such as the cover, title, dedications, prologue and so on. He has included a reference to 'todo comentario que pudiese arrojar luz para la comprensión de cualquier unidad, bloque o sintagma narrativo, fuese una monografía entera o un solo capítulo, pá gina, pá rrafo o nota'. In the printed version, moreover, the entries for major books, monographs or articles, usefully include a list of contents or sections, which gives a sense of the topics covered by a particular writer. The result is an immensely detailed record of critical endeavour across the entire field of Quixote studies. All in all, this is a huge and, indeed, selfless achievement, for which Professor Ferná ndez deserves the sincere congratulations and gratitude of the community of Cervantes scholars.
In his latest study of the Quixote, Cesá reo Bandera asks how this humble story, so 'monda y desnuda' in its author's own (ironic?) estimation, could have generated the modern novel. He proceeds to elaborate a complex and intricate answer which is not easy to summarize in the space of this review. Like his earlier Mimesis conflictiva, his interpretation draws upon René Girard's theory of desire as the well-spring of fiction. In essence, he argues that Don Quixote's madness arises from his desire to imitate Amadís, but he secretly doubts whether he could ever live up to his model, so the model becomes an obstacle, which only serves to intensify Quixote's desire and turn it into a self-defeating, circular fiction which the mad knight tries ever harder to impose on reality through violence. Don Quixote's madness is not unique, however, because several other characters exhibit similar desires, albeit in lesser degree. Professor Bandera discusses the interpolated novels in this light, comparing them with pastoral novels, whose characters are said to suffer also from a self-defeating quixotic desire. And in Part Two, he sees Sansón Carrasco and the Duke and Duchess, among others, as victims of this type of maddening, fiction-spawning desire for an impossible object.
However, Cervantes' treatment of this madness produced a modern form of writing. It replaced old genres such as epic and tragedy with something quite new because it 'desacralized' both the hero of epic and the sacrificial victim of tragedy in the figure of his mad protagonist, the would-be hero Don Quixote. Unlike the treatment of madness in premodern literature, which was to expel the madman from society and 'sacrifice' him as its victim, Cervantes treats Don Quixote in a Christian way by showing how the madman can be cured and find salvation: Cervantes 'is using the fictional form in which mad Don Quixote is trapped to free him, to save him from his madness'. For example, both Cervantes and Sophocles, according to Professor Bandera, are 'handling the same kind of literary instrument', but 'Sophocles is doing it to justify the expulsion of the victim, which is what his god demands; Cervantes is doing it to save the victim, which is also what his god demands'. This 'subversion' of the old fictional form is recognized explicitly at the level of the theme: 'Don Quixote is mad because he has fallen victim to the old fiction' (20). Thus, for Bandera the modern novel differs radically from the old forms of narrative in as much as it discovers the uniqueness of the individual*it gives its characters a voice, a personal voice, thereby saving them from the old stereotypes imposed by social collectivity.
To a large extent the book's central thesis is developed by contrasting Cervantes' achievement with the work of other contemporary writers such as Alemá n, Quevedo, Avellaneda, Montemayor and Gil Polo, and here Professor Bandera enriches our understanding of the literature of the period with acute and instructive insights. He also offers wellinformed critiques of Bakhtin, Foucault and Américo Castro, and engages sympathetically, but also critically, with Unamuno's Christian-existentialist interpretation of Don Quixote's madness. Bandera puts forward some intriguing ideas, such as, for instance, the idea of 'Cervantine repentance'*of Cervantes' 'apology before God' for having 'exposed his protagonist to public ridicule. The cure and salvation of Don Quixote at the end of the novel is the final expression of that act of repentance' (291). The argument, it has to be said, is conducted at a high level of abstraction, and this makes it difficult to evaluate the central contention that the modernity of Don Quixote lies in the fact that Cervantes 'saves' the hero from his madness. One wishes there could have been a more detailed analysis of the narrative which would have allowed a better appreciation of how some of the undoubtedly original and stimulating ideas put forward by Professor Bandera related to the text itself. Lope's El vellocino de oro was commissioned as part of festivities that took place in Aranjuez in 1622 to celebrate Philip IV's seventeenth birthday, which really occurred on the 8 April but was postponed to 15 May. There are indications that the play was originally a three-act piece which Lope adapted with some modifications to fit the occasion. The celebration, other than Lope's play, included the Count of Villamediana's La gloria de Niquea which was to be performed on 15 May with Lope's play coming two days later. The dual performances were due to the practice of providing a playful competition between noble ladies. On this occasion, the queen, Isabel of Bourbon was in charge of Villamediana's play and Leonor Pimental of Lope's comedia. The play, by the way, was interrupted by a fire which gave rise to the wellknown anecdote relating to Villamediana's supposed interest in the Queen. Palace performances, as it has been noted, had two major characteristics, one was the large number of parts, some of them very small, in order to give everyone a chance to participate in the play (Villamediana's piece, for instance had seventeen parts). The other was the utilization of stage machinery to provide spectacular scenery. Lope's play includes a golden ram on wheels, a mountain that opens up, a nymph on a silver dolphin, a cloud that opens up to reveal Mars, two fire breathing bulls that guard the Golden Fleece, etc. The man in charge of constructing the machinery for the festivity was Giulio Cesare Fontana whom Villamediana had known in Naples.
The play itself is composed of two distinct stories, related but not organically united. This condition is not particularly different from other palatine plays since they are often constructed of autonomous segments to give occasion to the presentation of spectacular effects. Although the main purpose of the two separate stories was to make possible the multiple love relationships so dear to the comedia, there is a reasonable connection between the two. The first story relates to Phrixus and his sister Helle who, cast into the sea by their jealous stepmother, are saved by divine intervention when a golden ram is sent to transport them to Colchis. Here, Phrixus sacrifices the ram to Jupiter and then hangs its fleece on a tree which, guarded by a sleepless dragon, assures the safety of the state. We are thus given the origin of the story besides providing the occasion for the aforementioned scenic effects and extending the number of acting roles. The second story is properly related to Jason, his encounter with Medea and his acquisition of the Fleece. However, since the occasion was hardly one in which to inject unpleasantness, the more sanguinary aspects of the myth are not included and Lope merely alludes to the eventual unhappy relationship between Jason and Medea. Indeed, the play ends with Amor bidding the young couple, perhaps ironically, a happy life and many descendents. The connection between these myths and the young king is made through the mention of the Order of the Golden Fleece of which Charles V was its long-time master. The intention seems to be to connect the glory of Greece and of the Roman Empire to the Spanish Empire through Mars' prophecy and a later one by Jason himself.
An important extra-literary aspect of the play is the detailed relación that Antonio Hurtado de Mendoza left us. Dedicated to the Countess of Olivares, Mendoza describes the site, Aranjuez, the garden, the preparation of the scenic machinery, the names of the noble actors, the music, the costumes and a summary of the play. He also wrote a shorter relación in verse in which he describes the fire and the courageous reaction of the king. This report is of great importance for the information it gives on the nature and the atmosphere surrounding these festivities.
Professor Profeti bases her praiseworthy edition on the 1624 edition included in Lope's Parte XIX and overseen by the dramatist himself. She gives a detailed description of all extant seventeenth-century editions as well as mentioning the important modern editions of the play. The critical apparatus is exquisitely presented, from the clear and informative introduction, to the transmission of the various editions, the breakdown of the metres used, and the reproduction of the Mendoza reports. The ample footnotes explain the scenic machinery used as well as annotate obscure passages and references. The edition is rendered more amenable by the reproduction of the frontispieces of the publications of the Mendoza reports as well as the inclusion of various helpful indices. In 1665 the priest and moralist Benito Remigio Noydens (1630Á1685) published in Madrid his Decisiones prá cticas y morales para curas, confesores y Capellanes de los ejércitos y armadas.
A compendium of the rules of warfare, his text explores the ethical dilemmas and difficult judgments facing clerics of the period who worked with the Spanish military forces. Elena del Río Parra has produced a very useful scholarly edition of this work, accompanied by erudite notes as well as an introduction, the contents of which make significant contributions to a nuanced understanding of the confluences between Church and military history.
A conception of Noydens' work as ultimately a moral guide intended to ensure the salvation of Christian soldiers' souls while also achieving worldly victory corresponds with del Río's interest in the history of the conscience in Spain, research that recently resulted in the publication of her monograph Cartografías de la conciencia españ ola en la Edad de Oro (México D.F.: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2008). In her introduction to Noydens' Decisiones prá cticas del Río contextualizes the work within a tradition of writings on the theme of the legitimacy of war, arguing that Noydens meant to affirm military strategy and moral theology as complementary rather than contradictory fields of expertise. She suggests his text is an 'artefacto cultural' (27) with potentially far reaching implications for military law's partial origins in ecclesiastical reasoning and foundations, such as the assumption that faith and the observance of religious orthodoxy led to victory in arms. According to del Río, Noydens 'se apropia de la bibliografía militar escrita por militares para, sobre ésta, incorporar dudas provenientes de la teología moral' (16). His text is unique among works on the ethics of warfare in that it encompasses the moral principles of a broader humanism while also establishing a particularly Roman Catholic point of view, forging a practical convergence between the separate discursive worlds of military treatises and theology.
Scant biographical information on Noydens has survived. Born in Antwerp to a father who was a captain and government secretary, he arrived in Spain at the age of five. He went on to become a member of the Clérigos Regulares Menores and to publish numerous treatises that testified to his popular success as a writer: Prá ctica del oficio de curas y confesores (1652), Promptuario moral (1659), and Prá ctica de exorcistas y ministros de la iglesia (1661). In the case of Decisiones prá cticas Noydens wrote for an ecclesiastic reader with a deep interest in military ethics. The work contains fifteen chapters, only one of which, Chapter 14, deals especially with the responsibilities of chaplains. The rest of the work is dedicated to the following topics: a definition of war, the conditions necessary for a just war, if both sides in an armed conflict can be justly engaged in warfare, if Christians can ally themselves with Turks or infidels in wars against other Christians, if it is a sin for galley slaves to forcedly row for the Turks in naval battles against Christians, the licit strategies of war, if women can bear arms, if soldiers can act without permission of their captains, the sorts of homicides acceptable in war, if slavery resulting from warfare is licit and if the blacks of Guinea and Angola can be justly bought and sold, responsibilities of soldiers and their superiors, means to victory, punishments ordered by law against the transgressions of soldiers, and a collection of rules and aphorisms on the art of war.
Noydens' concise and highly readable treatise will be of great interest to those concerned with the ethical dilemmas and cultural assumptions that shaped the Spanish soldier's experience of war in the seventeenth century. Not only do scholars and students now have an important new resource that offers fresh insight into the Church's intimate relationship with secular military power, del Río's meticulous and learned notes provide fresh directions that invite further research.
Con esta nueva edición, la editorial Cá tedra pone a disposición de la comunidad académica un texto bá sico para el estudio del siglo XVIII, que no se encontraba disponible, ya que, como se indicó, desde 1977 no había sido reeditado, a pesar de la versión aparecida en la Biblioteca Virtual Cervantes. Del mismo modo que Luzá n quiso ser ú til a su nación levantando el edificio de La poética para colaborar en la reforma cultural, la editorial Cá tedra, utilizando las palabras del autor, no ha querido 'ceder en el laudable deseo de ser ú til' a los interesados por la cultura españ ola. This study of literary images of the Holy Office between 1789 and 1848 is impressive, both in the richness of the material garnered about all the relevant features of life in this period, and also in the organizational skills and the clarity of mind which have shaped the mass of information and analyses. What might have been a comparatively narrow field of research has been opened up into a panoramic view with European dimensions. As for the thinkers and critics, both European and North American, who have touched on any aspect of the subject, it has not been just a case of 'rounding up the usual suspects'. Indeed it is difficult to imagine that more than a very few, if any, critical works have eluded the author's filing system. After an introduction defining the book's scope*including topics such as Protestant polemics, the secularization of society, the concepts of 'descristianización, desmitificación y desenmascaramento' (17), the 'sociabilidad del Café frente a la del Templo' (17Á18)*the ingenious, Russian-doll-like structure has the material divided into three main sections: 'La Bastilla españ ola: Inquisición y literatura revolucionaria', 'El tema inquisitorial y la polémica histórica en los orígenes de la sociedad liberal' and 'La consolidación de la sociedad liberal y la recreación literaria de la Inquisición'. Within each part of this framework three or four chapters are grouped, each with its own series of subsections. In parallel with this framework there runs another structure. Each main section begins by surveying a wide area of the factors which have brought about changes in images of the Inquisition, and then moves on to focus on one or more key texts illustrating these changes in operation. This method avoids the temptation to trawl through every relevant play, novel and poem, with the attendant risk of potentially tedious repetition. Instead of this, the chapter on the Romantic theatre illustrates the points to be made by discussing Antonio Gil y Zá rate's Carlos II el hechizado and Hartzenbusch's Doñ a María, while the Romantic novels analysed are Escosura's Ni rey, ni roque and Eugenio de Ochoa's El auto de fe. The following chapter traces the bursting of the Romantic balloon of hyperbole as the anti-Romantic reaction sets in, bringing with it the 'desmitificación de los elementos má s terroríficos' with which earlier nineteenth-century authors had wrung the public's nerves in tear-jerking tales in the manner of 'Monk Lewis' and the gothic novel. Rather than associating the Inquisition with the horrors and might of Hell, Eugenio de Tapia's La bruja, el duende y la Inquisición, Poema romá ntica y burlesca (1837) makes fun of inquisitors' gullibility as far as witchcraft was concerned.
A final chapter leads from fiction to fact and to the years after 1840, discussing the image of the Inquisition in 'la historia nacional', and the book ends with a powerful and vividly expressed conclusion. In literature, Muñ oz Sempere declares, the Inquisition myth owes its success to 'la supervivencia del Santo Oficio como castillo gótico, medieval, representante del poder arbitrario y la barbarie. El sadismo, la subterraneidad y la privación burkeana son imá genes contrapuestas a los valores burgueses de sensibilidad, publicidad y derechos del hombre'. The central image of 'gothic' portrayals of the Inquisition is 'un mundo subterrá neo, un infierno dantesco que ademá s se presta al desarrollo de las teorías estéticas burkeanas sobre lo sublime y la privación como fuente de sentimientos inconmensurables' (212Á13).
The breadth and depth of the reading which has fuelled this study are reflected in the extremely well stocked bibliography, and the book's presentation shows the care typical of Tamesis. Not only in its analyses of literature but in its grasp of the politics, history and thought of the chosen period this is a valuable work of scholarship. One cannot ignore the jacket of a book that argues for the importance of the paratext of nineteenth-century dramatic literature. It reproduces the appearance of an edited play in one of the literary 'galleries' or collections of the period and directs us to the rear cover: 'this groundbreaking study examines the ways in which theatre (in its multiple forms) intervened in the political and cultural debates of the Romantic age'. We may add that this study shows how developments in cultural, political and, also, social life conditioned Romanticism and the emergence of dramatic literature as a social institution. Lisa Surwillo's historicism provides us with a unique materialist study of theatre and literature. The book is structured in 'stages'. The first of these deals with the advent of Romanticism, Spain's liberal regime, and the concession to authors of intellectual property rights which, legally, make them professional writers; this is the material side of Romantic individualism.
Here, Surwillo pays special attention to the sociological importance of the legendary moment at the premier of El trovador when the public enthusiastically demanded that the play's young author, Antonio García Gutiérrez, take a bow. In the second stage Surwillo treats developments in the publishing industry and the importance of the editor in the wake of the textualization of theatre and the professionalization of writing. The last stage discusses the establishment of nineteenth-century editorial collections, the literary equivalent of the art gallery. A study of the edition as paratext follows; the way it reaches out to the public for promotional purposes but may also direct itself inward and contribute to the import of the text, itself.
For this reviewer Surwillo's most significant contribution is the parallelism that she establishes between desamortización*disentailment, or efforts to redistribute land to individual property owners*and, in 1837, the Spanish monarchy's concession of property rights to writers for the theatre. The book's focus on authors' rights is understandably but also regrettably limited. This study gives us just one episode in a future, broader work on cultural life and its personalities, which views them as part of nineteenth-century social and political history. The rise of the dramatic literature industry is of central importance, but, as Surwillo's discussion of art galleries suggests, the disentailment of cultural life takes place in other areas, as well. We might even most clearly see it in the world of music. The closing of churches in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries left musicians, who depended upon them, unprotected. This was aggravated by the popularity of Italian opera companies. By the midnineteenth century, as a group, they called for the creation of a nationwide music syndicate that would provide them with a livelihood through the production of national operas. This never took place, but the national opera ultimately turned into the zarzuela, which rivalled non-lyric theatre in profitability. Notwithstanding the popular images of social life that it projects, of all the genres, the zarzuela might be the most perfectly bourgeois one, because its maturity in the nineteenth century is so rooted in commercial gain; hence lyric theatre's ever present tension between commerce and artistry. Likewise, one would expect a wider 'disentailment' of the plastic arts, with works that had previously belonged to the Catholic church moving into private collections and with the opening of private solons.
A broader study probably would have strengthened some of Surwillo's arguments. For example, she discusses the association of 'derechos de autor' with a desire to lift Spanish theatre out of a state of decadence and she pays special attention to 1837, when the queen ceded to authors their property rights. Surwillo argues that at this juncture there is an important rhetorical transformation of theatre's 'mal estado' into its 'decadencia'. However, how different is this from Don Pedro's rhetoric some forty years earlier in Moratín's La comedia nueva, when he spoke of theatre as 'corrompido', 'perdido' by authors who terrorize ('tiranizan') the public with formulaic works that their financial situation conditioned. There might indeed be a different sense in the complaints about the state of the theatre in the mid-1830s, but this remains to be clarified, as does the relationship between the writers who pursued the rights of authors and the enlightenment, which profoundly influenced them.
Likewise, while it is tangential to the immediate intent of Surwillo's study, the failures of Spanish liberalism and, in time, the moderation of its early proponents requires further clarification. Even the radical young writers of the 1830s respected monarchy and nobility; it is symptomatic of their position that the nobility of character of our great Romantic stage heroes reflects their aristocratic blood. Moreover, for example, the insulting, coercive tactics reportedly used to force the queen in 1836 to embrace the Constitution of Cá diz, elicited an anti-radical reaction based in the generation's abiding respect for monarchy, and this surely contributed to mid-century conservatism. Does the adoption of a progresista constitution in 1837 represent the victory of radicalism, or a definitive merger of the monarchy's supporters and its former opponents, who now throw in their lot with a very conservative liberal state? The liberal achievement of the rights of authors in the 1830s, the increasing textualization of the stage, and the growth of the theatre literature industry suggests at least a moderately successful cultural disentailment. However, by mid-century we have the emergence of a conservative clique of authors in Madrid society who, as Surwillo points out, work for a living at theatre, hold government posts, and do not always seem to understand the rights that they have achieved. They, moreover, maintain a very conservative, elitist view of 'fine art and literature'. Should this suggest to us that cultural desamortización was, ultimately, as limited as the effects of land reform?
This book is directed to Hispanists and a public interested in the history of print culture. It is attractively prepared, though we note one editorial problem. This is the omission of footnote 25 on page 19. However, such an insignificant matter should not detract from Surwillo's appreciable insight into theatre as part of a concrete, material history. This will surely be a book that students of Spain's nineteenth century*including, immediately, the present reviewer*frequently cite.
El estudio insiste contundentemente en las similitudes que existen entre el realismo de Ayguals y el de la generación posterior, sin detenerse demasiado en las diferencias (el excesivo maniqueísmo de la trama, por ejemplo). La atención casi exclusiva que se presta a las técnicas empleadas por Ayguals deja poco espacio a la consideración de algunos aspectos interesantísimos de las novelas tales como el tratamiento del veraneo, o el aseo y las nociones de higiene, que el autor no hace sino señ alar de pasada. Son tales aspectos*entre otros muchos*que en el marco de los actuales estudios culturales pueden despertar de nuevo el interés por las novelas de Ayguals de Izco. This edition reproduces thirty-eight articles by the journalist Mariano de Cá via (Zaragoza, 1855ÁMadrid, 1920, which originally appeared in El Liberal in 'Los Platos del Día' between 1887 and 1890, and were collected together and published under the title Azotes y Galeras in 1891. The articles, which Cá via referred to as his 'colecciones de herborista literaria' (101), are preceded by a critical introduction, which is divided into four parts. After a brief piece on the historical context and a chronological table, the third part, written by Á ngulo Egea and entitled 'Mariano de Cá via: ni se le recuerda, ni se le comprende', explores the general impressions of Cá via, 'un escritor castizo, amante de su patria' (17), and examines the few critical studies on the author. Á ngulo Egea rightly insists that Cá via 'fue un periodista, no un literato' (59) and situates his work in its nineteenth-century context, concluding 'Sus artículos conforman el microcosmos de la Españ a de finales del XIX y principios del XX' (63). She provides information about Cá via the man, his life and his beliefs, including his anticlerical tendencies and republican sympathies. She also highlights the similarities the author shared with Larra but notes some key differences: for instance, 'Cá via gustaba má s del entorno, del café y Larra de implicarse en política' (61).
The fourth section, by Leal Bonmati, focuses upon Azotes y galeras and analyses the main themes and style of the work. The themes include Cá via's republicanism, his casticismo, his attitude towards the Church, the fashionable status attached to France and England, and literature. This is an ambitious section and, although it does provide a useful introduction to Cá via's life and work, offering the reader much food for thought, it is (perhaps naturally) rather disparate because it seeks to cover so many different aspects in a restricted space.
The articles themselves introduce the contemporary reader to Cá via's sharp wit, irony, scathing humour, indignant tone and habit of playing on words. They cover a range of topics, from politics to the theatre, communicating the flavour of this period of dramatic developments and frequent turbulence. Cá via records his personal reactions to contemporary events and situations, for instance the fear that accompanied the tide of emigration in 'Esta Península se alquila', whilst 'Adoquines y tarugos', is a satirical and humorous attack on the artificiality of the turno pacífico. Famed for his articles on bullfighting, the author sometimes employs imagery from this sport, interspersing it with his critical comments.
The footnotes to the articles are particularly useful, providing a useful context to the individual pieces and, arguably, an indispensable background for a full appreciation of Cá via's work, which was filled with references to events and popular figures of the period in which he was writing. It is, however, unfortunate that, in terms of its presentation, the volume is rather unpolished; the spacing is often inconsistent, and some italics and accents are missing. In addition, the summary on the back cover is confusing since here we read that the volume is 'un compendio de sus artículos publicados en El Imparcial', but the Introduction (38 and 64) tells us that the articles were originally published in El Liberal. It would have been useful if the table of contents had included the page numbers for the different introductory sections and, at a time when visual culture is becoming increasingly popular, it is regrettable that the decision was made not to reproduce the illustrations which appeared alongside the text in the 1891 edition published by Fernando Fe.
None the less, the editors' aim to highlight the work of Cá via, just one of the many forgotten journalists of the fin de siglo, a time when the press played a crucial role in the formation of modern Spain, is entirely commendable. This volume will doubtless play an important part in making Cá via's articles more widely known and stimulate further research on his work.
Dr Castro studies the Surrealist poetry of four members of the so called 'Generation of 1927': Lorca, Cernuda, Alberti and Aleixandre. Defining Surrealism as 'un arte perturbador' (15), Castro examines the manner in which all four poets subvert societal norms in their search to affirm their individuality through and in their poetry. The study opens with a theoretical chapter, which draws principally on the work of Julia Kristeva. In 'The System and the Speaking Subject', Kristeva argues that social order is controlled through language. According to Kristeva, repressive patriarchal discourse excludes 'el discurso ''Otro'' o marginal' (15) and resists 'la ambivalencia' (20) of language. In order to challenge such discourse, Castro argues that the four poets seek to free language from the constraints of conventional logic. She proposes that their often exphrastic poems, which blur the boundaries between the verbal and the visual, invite multiple interpretations. In doing so, they challenge the monological nature of 'el discurso dominante' (16). Castro's study also draws on Kristeva's theory of the abject, defined as 'todo ''aquello que perturba a una identidad, un sistema, un orden'' ' (26). In the light of Kristeva's theory of abjection, Castro examines the subversive nature of the Surrealist fascination with violence and scatology. Although the theoretical chapter is generally clearly written, several key concepts are glossed over. Terms such as the 'semiotic' and the 'symbolic', which figure prominently in Castro's argument, would have benefited from further elucidation. The second chapter analyses the verbal/visual connection in the Surrealist poetry of Lorca, dominated by his sexual frustration and confrontation with heterosexual societal norms. Castro studies his exphrastic prose poems 'Nadadora sumergida ' (1928) and 'Suicidio en Alejandría ' (1928) in relation with his drawings of the same title. Stressing the importance of studying his poems and drawings together, Castro shows how they enrich one another and can be read and viewed from a range of perspectives. Castro then examines the subversive role played by the 'abject' in a selection of texts from Lorca's 'ciclo neoyorquino' (44). The chapter concludes with an insightful analysis of the role played by 'la mirada' in his Surrealist work. Alert to the multiple references to blindness in his texts and drawings, she equates the repression of 'la mirada' with societal repression of homosexuality.
The third chapter focuses on Un río, un amor (1929) and Los placeres prohibidos (1931) by Cernuda. In both books he investigates his alienated self in a bourgeois society, exploring and affirming his homosexuality. Castro examines the cinematic influences on his Surrealist verse, concentrating on his distinctive use of collage. By incorporating images and phrases from the cinema into his poetry, Castro argues that Cernuda introduces 'la ambivalencia en el texto y [. . .] desestabiliza el valor monológico de la realidad impuesto por la cultura dominante' (74). She also examines how he uses the mythical figure of Narcissus in order to voice his homosexual identity. Her perceptive readings of often hermetic texts demonstrate that the poet withdraws from social reality in order to discover and examine himself in his own reflection. Although the essay elucidates important aspects of Cernuda's Surrealist poetry, particularly the role played by self-perception in his texts, it tends to overlook the selective use which he made of Surrealism, never embracing its tenets entirely.
The fourth chapter focuses on Alberti's three Surrealist books, in which he voices his inner anguish. The images of death and destruction contained in Sobre los á ngeles (1927Á28) and Sermones y moradas (1929) are analysed in conjunction with the equally disquieting images contained in the paintings of Maruja Mallo. Yo era un tonto y lo que he visto me ha hecho dos tontos (1929Á30) is studied in the light of the comic cinema of Buster Keaton and Charles Chaplin.
The fifth chapter examines four books by Aleixandre: Pasión de la tierra (1928Á29), Espadas como labios (1930Á31), La destrucción o el amor (1932Á33) and Mundo a solas (1934Á36). Each book, characterized by Aleixandre's sense of alienation within the confines of conventional society, is studied alongside the paintings of Maruja Mallo, Salvador Dalí and Ó scar Domínguez. Castro also pays particular attention to the syntactical fragmentation and to the images of physical violence which dominate many of Aleixandre's texts.
Throughout this closely argued book, Castro offers a series of illuminating readings of the strategies developed by individual poets in order to confront and question societal conventions. Whilst the links between the poets could have been further developed and the conclusions less repetitious, this is a subtle study of an important body of twentieth-century Spanish poetry. By exploring the relationship between the verbal and the visual in the Surrealist poetry of Lorca, Cernuda, Alberti and Aleixandre, Castro invites us to assume the role of the reader and the spectator of texts which 'quedan abiertos a mú ltiples interpretaciones, a mú ltiples metamorfosis' (167). En un pozo de lumbre brings together a collection of papers that were presented at a conference held in Murcia in October 2007, as part of the commemorations organized in Spain that year to mark the centenary of the birth of writer Carmen Conde (1907Á1996). The authors of the eighteen papers included are mostly academics from universities in Spain, although there are also contributions by a scholar from the United States, one from Argentina and one from Italy. The volume opens with a short introduction penned by the editors, Francisco Javier Díez de Revenga and Mariano de Paco, both from the University of Murcia. It also includes an 'album' of photos of Conde, together with reproductions of the cover pages of some of her books, some manuscript pages and Conde's certificate of entry into the Real Academia Españ ola in 1978, to which she was the first woman to be admitted. The papers included in the volume discuss Conde's work from a variety of perspectives and focus on different aspects of her diverse literary career. Best known as a poet, Conde also wrote prose texts, children's literature, plays, essays and biographies, as well as publishing her own three-volume autobiography, and it is this diversity that the essays included here seek to highlight. While some of the essays do discuss Conde's poetry (Cano Ballesta, Díaz de Castro, Miró), an area of her production that can hardly be overlooked in any study of her work, it is her less-studied writings that are the volume's focus. This includes Conde's prose poems (Balcells) and other prose writings, such as her first novel and collection of short stories published in the mid-1940s (Jiménez Madrid), and the later novel Soy la madre (Belmonte Serrano), her writings for and about children (Gómez Yebra), her early theatrical works (de Paco), and her biographies of female religious figures, most notably Saint Teresa of Á vila (Rubio Jiménez).

University of Exeter.
Among the most original contributions to the volume are an essay that discusses unpublished plays that Conde wrote in collaboration with other women in the early 1930s (Serrano) and a study of her contributions to literary journals in the early period of her career (Ramos Ortega), writings that have been the subject of little critical attention to date. There is also an interesting essay that discusses the importance of unpublished dedications in Conde's manuscripts (Díez de Revenga), many of which the author dedicated to her life-long friend Amanda Junquera. Other more unusual topics included in the volume are a paper discussing a bilingual anthology in Italian of some of Conde's most important works (Morelli), an essay analysing the many references to Castille in her writings (Palomo), and a discussion of the poems and other texts dedicated to Conde by poet Vicente Aleixandre (Emiliozzi).
Other essays in the volume offer less original contributions, covering ground that will be familiar to scholars of Conde's work, such as background about her childhood and early literary influences (Ferris), and a discussion of her memoirs in the context of the Western autobiographical tradition (Alfonso García). There is also an essay discussing Conde and her work in terms of the changing gender dynamics of the early twentieth century, which makes reference to works by her female contemporaries (Payeras Grau).
The essays included in this collection do not generally draw on contemporary literary theory, which in many cases would provide a useful theoretical framework for their discussions. Notwithstanding this shortcoming, En un pozo de lumbre is nevertheless a useful volume for scholars of Conde, and is successful in highlighting the lesser-studied aspects of her work. It contains a wealth of relevant contextual information and provides a comprehensive overview of the prolific and diverse literary production of one of Spain's most distinguished twentieth-century women writers.

SARAH LEGGOTT
Victoria University of Wellington. This groundbreaking study of the representation of the male body in post-Franco film is accessible, wide-ranging and theoretically sophisticated. It provides lucid discussion of an impressive range of around 250 films with reference to a wide-ranging bibliography of over 300 texts. It is a welcome addition to university reading lists and previous research on gender and sexuality in Spanish film, and it has much to offer students and academics alike. The introduction acknowledges a debt to feminist film analysis of the female body as text, and to work on gender, sexuality and the body in Spanish film by Paul Julian Smith, Chris Perriam and Tatjana Pavlović. The authors also highlight the importance of key texts by Peter Evans, Barry Jordan and Rikki Morgan-Tamosunas, Marsha Kinder, Isabel Santaolalla, Nú ria Triana-Toribio and many more. The discussion is then divided into eight chapters, each prefaced with a succinct introduction to the appropriate theoretical background followed by detailed discussion of a range of films. Chapter 1 examines the 'macho ibérico' from the 1970s to the 1990s, beginning with the buttoned-up characterization of the Spanish male in typical 'destape' comedies starring José Luis López Vá zquez and Alfredo Landa. This leads on to more detailed examination of the ironic representation of the hyper-macho in Bigas Luna's 1990s trilogy and the exploitation of Santiago Segura's anti-macho star persona in the Torrente sagas. This chapter provides the basis for one of the major themes of the book, which is the extent to which the Spanish male body functions as 'other' in relation to Europe and to Hollywood, and whether this produces a certain diffidence in the representation of the Spanish male lead.
Chapter 2 explores the commodification of teenage bodies in Historias del Kronen (1995), Barrio (1998) and Planta cuarta (2003), focusing on the teenage body as a metaphor for rebellion and transition, as well as a site of abjection. Chapter 3 examines the extent to which the muscular male mediates issues of national identity, noting that this tradition (dating from classical Greek sculpture to contemporary Hollywood) is rare in Spanish film. The authors contend that where the Spanish hunk (exemplified by Bardem and Banderas) does appear, the performance tends to represent masculinity in crisis. This chapter focuses on El corazón del guerrero (2000) and Juana la loca (2001). Chapter 4, on '(Dis)abled Bodies', examines the parody of Hollywood Sci-fi in Acción mutante (1993), and Javier Bardem's performances in Mar adentro (2004) and Carne trémula (1997). In Chapter 5, the discussion of the representation of homosexual bodies ranges from Diferente (1962) to El diputado (1978) and Almodóvar's La ley del deseo (1987), the latter singled out as a benchmark for the representation of gay male relationships in Spanish film. This chapter also provides close analysis of three important and less well-known films, Segunda piel (1999), Cachorro (2004) and Amic/Amac (1999). Chapter 6 on 'Transformed Bodies', notes the importance of the Spanish Law of Gender Identity (passed in 2007 and allowing for gender reassignment without sex-change surgery): it traces a cinematic history of cross-gender representation from Some Like It Hot (1959) with reference to El extrañ o viaje (1964), Mi querida señ orita (1972), Pon un hombre en tu vida (1996) and 20 centimetros (2005), with additional discussion of Almodóvar's anti-Manichean approach to questions of sex and gender. Chapter 7, 'Foreign Bodies', broadens the discussion to encompass the effects of globalization and immigration with reference to the controversial film La fuente amarilla (1999) that outraged Madrid's Chinese community, and to Ilegal (2003). ¿Hola está s sola? (1995) and La pasión turca (1994) are also discussed with reference to the fetishizing of the foreign male body. Chapter 8, 'The Genitals', examines the increase in male frontal nudity with reference to Medem's Lucía y el sexo and to the fetishizing of the male body in Almodóvar films from Matador (1986) to Mala educación (2004).
The questions raised by this study are a sign of its scope and breadth, although a concluding chapter would have been useful to sum up the debate and propose lines of further inquiry. There is little space in this wide-ranging discussion to explore how the representation of the female body affects the representation of the male body or to problematize the representation of 'feminized' men. It could also be argued that the final chapter tends to discuss the representation of the men per se rather than genitals in particular, but this only highlights the need for more research on the difficulty of representing and discussing sex difference on-screen, and the value of this thought-provoking and important book. (2). The studies contained therein implement that assumption by examining the history of gender in relation to the colonization of the Americas. They study how women and ideologies of gender participated in the various mechanisms of colonial control that different European powers used and assess the multiple ways in which African, indigenous, mixed race and European women responded to the mechanisms that Europe introduced to manage New World territories, resources, and populations (9). Among the many recurring scholarly questions featured in this volume, 'race' is perhaps the most important. A significant aspect of almost every essay, its impact is of such magnitude that it almost eclipses gender. Similarities and differences among areas and colonial regencies are highlighted. As many have noted, and several of these essays suggest, Anglo-America placed a greater emphasis and premium on monoracial liaisons than did other areas of the western regions of the Atlantic world. Inheritance laws recognized mixed-race offspring everywhere except in the British colonies, for instance. Mixed-race people and cultural mestizaje played pivotal roles in creating New World societies. In addition, other, more subtle and complex questions regarding the encounters of differing ethnic groups within the colonial context are ably worked out in many of the articles. Throughout, the interaction of race and gender remains paramount.
The volume editor intends that the essays included examine the history of gender by either studying how women and ideologies of gender participated in European powers' mechanisms of colonial control, or by assessing the multiple ways in which women of different races responded to European mechanisms of managing New World territories, resources and populations (9). Regarding women and gender roles, several commonalities and discrepancies can be noted. As Patricia Seed notes in the Afterword, 'women in the Atlantic world had three major avenues to autonomy unavailable to their continental cousins: commerce, convents and conversion' (170). She points out that women everywhere engaged in trading and commerce (166). The economic and social fragmentation of the Atlantic world facilitated women's access to a greater sphere of action than in Europe, despite differing opportunities according to racial categories. European gender role expectations nevertheless continued to hold sway.
Convents, though, like other women's networks, facilitated communication across races. This was true even when African-Americans and indigenous women were barred from full participation in religious Orders everywhere except in the French colonies. On a macro level, Jaffary avers that current scholarship has moved beyond the assumption that the Church only repressed women, toward an examination of how gender influences religious experience and religion influences gender construction (8).
As the Introduction makes explicitly clear, Gender, Race and Religion in the New World is not intended to be a 'systematic comparative treatment of colonialism in the Americas', but rather a series of case studies (3). Viewed as a group, the articles adopt a comprehensive view of female agency, revealing the implications of women's experiences in colonialism (9). Situating the book in the field of Atlantic World studies, the editor argues that two characteristics* a 'common colonial status' and race mixing (5)*primarily define the societies represented in the anthology. The colonial process meant exposure to the 'attempted transmission of Christian institutions and ideologies across the Atlantic' (7). Both Jaffary's Introduction and Seed's Afterword employ the term 'Atlantic world' to refer exclusively to the American colonies; with one exception, the book does not reference the African or European continents*areas which are sometimes included under that term.
Organized thematically, the volume contains four conceptually-based subdivisions. It treats the Dutch-, French-, Portuguese-and Spanish-speaking worlds, including the mainland Americas, two Caribbean islands and Europe; these language areas, however, are not equally covered. As noted above, only one article is situated in the old continent and none in Africa. The Spanish-American colonies are most heavily represented, with three articles about colonial Mexico, and two about Peru, in the mountains and on the coast. Also included are two essays on the French colonies, about Haiti and the Great Lakes region; one regarding Anglo-America; one concerning Brazil; and one referring to the Dutch colony of Curaçao and 'Tierra Firme'.
Part I, 'Frontiers', spans the sixteenth through the mid-eighteenth centuries, and juxtaposes three places, languages and colonial situations. The section incorporates the divergent ways in which colonial frontier societies contributed to shaping the lives of indigenous, mixed-race and European women. In 'Women as Go-Betweens?: Patterns in Sixteenth-Century Brazil', Alida C. Metcalf emphasizes women's active role as interpreters for the Jesuits during evangelization efforts, which allowed them to also become transactional go-betweens (25). Focusing on men, in 'Gender and Violence: Conquest, Conversion and Culture on New Spain's Imperial Frontier', Bruce A. Erickson underlines the role of militarized masculinity*and therefore women's minimal role*in upholding honour on New Spain's northern frontier. And in ' ''The Very Sinews of a New Colony'': Demographic Determinism and the History of Early Georgia Women, 1732Á1752', Ben Marsh describes the harsh conditions and demographic realities that in Georgia pushed British male colonists, despite prohibitions, to marry Creek women. There, as in both the Spanish and Portuguese colonies, women's legal status was secondary, even invisible. Nevertheless, the most successful women drew upon 'control of information, connections, and character' when neogiating the difficult circumstances of frontier life (52). All three contextualize the ideological and situational dynamics in which denizens of these areas made life decisions.
Part II, 'Female Religious', most directly explores the link between gender and religion. Susan Broomall contends in 'The Convent as Missionary in Seventeenth-Century France' that Antoinette de Saint-Estienne, a métis woman who eventually professed as a nun (in 1646) in France, functioned not only to renew fervour in a post-Tridentine environment, but also to challenge the then-accepted assumption that indigenous people valued freedom too much to confine themselves within monastic walls. Over time, the other nuns came to reject her 'Otherness' and accept her as one of them. The life story of the black convent servant Juana Esperanza de San Alberto, on the other hand, discussed by Joan C. Bristol in ' ''Although I am black, I am beautiful'': Juana Esperanza de San Alberto, Black Carmelite of Puebla', was intended to demonstrate that she was the exception that proved the rule: her extraordinary humility and piety*even her refusal to profess as a nun until her death bed, despite enormous pressure*served to maintain the social hierarchy and its ideological underpinnings about the inferiority of people of African descent. Kathryn Burns' article, 'Andean Women in Religion: Beatas, ''Decency'' and the Defence of Honour in Colonial Cuzco', describes another aspect of the race-gender matrix. She shows that in Cuzco it was the indigenous elite that founded houses for lay religious women (beaterios), as a way to place their daughters in positions of relative power, since only there could they aspire to hold office. The three articles demonstrate the by-now widely-accepted adage that the convent functioned as a place not only of refuge, but also of empowerment and community*within certain limits.
A detailed look at sexuality, marriage, and family arrangements, and their relationship to law, social mores and individual actions in the late colonial period characterizes Part III, 'Race Mixing'. Nora E. Jaffary analyses in 'Incest, Sexual Virtue and Social Mobility in Late Colonial Mexico' lay people's use of church prohibitions in legal proceedings, in order to prevent marriages deemed inappropriate. Yvonne Fabella discusses official discourses, in ' ''An Empire Founded on Libertinage'': The Mulâ tresse and Colonial Anxiety in Saint Domingue'. Free women of colour's socio-economic successes led to the mulâ tresse becoming a symbol of sexual indecency in Haitian society and in d'Auberteuil's late eighteenth-century treatise on the state of the French colony. In 'Mediating Mackinac: Métis Women's Cultural Persistence in the Upper Great Lakes', Bethany Fleming furthers the theme of gendered negotiations of public and private power with a detailed analysis of four women on Mackinac Island in the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries, who maintained their heritage through the everyday use of clothing, material culture and religion (127). Broadly based in thematic terms, this section explicates a wide variety of situations in which women and men availed themselves of racial categories in order to define a place within colonial societies.
Part IV, 'Networks', highlights women's use of inter-racial and inter-ethnic connections in both an urban environment and across colonial borders. In 'Circuits of Knowledge Among Women in Early Seventeenth-Century Lima', Nancy E. Van Deusen coins the term 'epistemological communities' to describe the ways in which women across races used religious study to build networks in early seventeenth-century Lima. The final essay of the volume (before the Afterword), Linda M. Rupert's 'Waters of Faith, Currents of Freedom: Gender, Religion and Ethnicity in Inter-Imperial Trade between Curaçao and Tierra Firme', in many ways summarizes and recapitulates the salient concerns of Gender, Race and Religion in the Colonization of the Americas. Rupert uses women's roles in commerce between Curaçao and the mainland to illustrate that ' [ . . .] the Atlantic can be conceptualized along a spectrum ''showing gradations in power, intensity of interaction, and social character'' in overlapping but somewhat independent economic, political and social systems [ . . .]', arguing further that '[. . .] women were particularly adroit in creating their own hybrid borderlands in the early modern world, managing multiple identities outside the bounds of official power structures and transforming the supposed margins of society into vibrant, locally defined centres' [ . . .] (152).
With the Afterword, Patricia Seed situates the salient issues, concerns, and themes of the volume in contemporary scholarship. A fitting end to a compact, but analytically complex volume, this essay by the noted scholar develops a conceptual framework for understanding the essays collected in the volume.
Useful for both classroom instruction and scholarly investigation, Gender, Race and Religion in the Colonization of the Americas engages many of the salient questions in Atlantic World studies today while at the same time offering a nuanced gender analysis of the dynamics of colonialism in the Americas.

STACEY SCHLAU
West Chester University, Pennsylvania. In many ways the cataclysmic effect of the conquest and colonization of Spanish America left a paucity of evidence about pre-Hispanic dramatic arts. The postcolonial project to recover indigenous literary voices of Mid-and South America has been facilitated by an increase in archival investigation. Recent translations and transcriptions of manuscripts have filled in gaps in the native history and culture, much to the enrichment of Latin-American Studies. In their trilingual book, the editors provide a context for the political, sociocultural and religious situation that defined the career of Don Bartolomé de Alva (Ixtlilxochitl). Alva, a mestizo parish priest, descended from the ruling house of Tetzcoco, achieved positions of authority within the colonial bureaucracy and ecclesiastical hierarchy. However, it was as a dramatist and linguist where he distinguished himself in collaboration with Jesuit priest Horacio Carochi. The latter, in a scheme to compile a bilingual grammar of Spanish and Nahuatl, annotated the plays that Alva adapted into Nahuatl. While the resultant dramas met the immediate needs of the Jesuit missionary agenda, part of their novelty is that they also reflected the latest theatrical conventions of Baroque Spain. This is the third volume in a series on Nahuatl theatre, which acknowledges and enriches the pioneering studies on the topic first introduced by Á ngel María Garibay K. The conceptual framework and critical theory employed in this book facilitate its appeal to an interdisciplinary readership. Each editor has contributed a well researched and engaging essay: 'A Dramatic Diaspora: Spanish Theater and its Mexican Interpretation' (Wright), 'Two Eminent and Classical Authors of the Discipline: Father Horacio Carochi, S.J. and Don Bartolomé de Alva, Nahuatl Scholars of New Spain' (Sell) and 'Nahuatl Baroque: How Alva Mexicanized the Spanish Dramas' (Burkhart). The essays explore the extent of the collaboration between Carochi and Alva and how they adapted the popular theatre of the Golden Age in Spain and transformed it for evangelical purposes to counter indigenous resistance. As part of his journey as a beneficed priest, Alva endeavoured to break the communication barrier that separated him from the native parishioners: 'Alva himself overcame prejudices against native Mexicans and mestizos' (5).
In Alva's hybrid body of plays, we find rich examples of Nahuatl speech, cultural continuity and theatrical innovations. The side-by-side placement of Spanish-English and Nahuatl-English text indicates the extent to which scenes and dialogue were altered. Alva truncated Lope de Vega's The Mother of the Best to showcase it as a nativity enactment devoid of pageantry and hagiography. The Animal Prophet and Fortunate Patricide, attributed to Lope, furnished Alva a platform to represent a Mexicanized version of the legend of Saint Julian the Hospitaler, complete with reconfigured Baroque love scenes in which an indigenous Julian proposes marriage to a Mexican Malintzin. The play's seduction plot and the social reality it depicted 'may have attracted Alva's and Carochi's attention because it featured an abandoned woman's angry words in direct discourse' (17). Alva classified his adaptation of Calderón de la Barca's auto sacramental The Theater of the World as a comedia. Although its allegory and metaphoric language challenged Nahuatl lexicon and was toned down, it delivered a moral message and met the confessional goals of Jesuit instruction. One discrepancy in Alva's rendition is the deletion of the Plowman and his speech about social inequality. To counterbalance the gravity of the drama with levity, Alva*following the model of theatrical practices in Spain*wrote a didactic companion entremés or 'Intermezzo', which satirized social decadence and promoted moral order. Collectively, the plays show how Jesuits interpreted selected compositions of Lope and Calderón and how 'Alva Mexicanizes his script not just by taking out theatrical terms. He also adds language that invokes local culture and nature' (38). Alva and Carochi placed the beauty of Nahuatl language on a plain with Spanish by highlighting its linguistic registers. Through adaptations of traditional Peninsular plays, they succeeded in opening a discursive space for indigenous culture to continue to flourish.
This edition makes available for the first time valuable literary creations that help us to enter the world of mid-colonial Mexican Baroque theatre. Of singular note is the deftness with which the editors document the marriage and history of Alva's and Carochi's texts. Skilled transcriptions, useful footnotes, endnotes, the index and list of reference sources translate into a volume that should be required reading for both students and scholars of early colonial letters. Since the essays are grouped together at the front of the volume, the book ends abruptly without the benefit of a summary or concluding analysis. This reservation aside, the editors, in what is to become a standard reference work, are to be commended for arguing the case of how Nahuatl theatre came to share centre stage with Peninsular Baroque drama. The volume devoted to Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, edited by Bergmann and Schlau, in the almost 100-volume Approaches to Teaching . . . series includes helpful background and 'howto' articles from more than two dozen of the most recognized names in the field, albeit virtually all from the US Anglo-speaking community. The selection of collaborators is perhaps to be expected, given the topic: how to teach the works of the colonial poet and essayist to a multi-disciplinarian student body in a presumably North American academy to classes that may frequently not be Spanish-speaking nor aimed at a major in Hispanic literatures or cultures.
The introduction provides a solid summary of Sor Juana's poetry, theatre and prose. At the same time, the editors frequently allude to sexuality and gender, characterizing the volume as a whole as 'a complex approach to the feminine', including queer studies, because Sor Juana, in their view, was 'unquestionably a protofeminist thinker' (4). It is stressed that, despite Sor Juana's secure canonical status as the first great Latin-American writer, very little of her work is actually taught. What the editors note is true, and, whether in deference to available anthologies or some other motive, the majority of essays in this volume base their analyses and 'how to teach' explanations on the self-same standards: the 'É ste que ves . . .' and carpe diem rose sonnets, the 'Hombres necios' redondillas, patented snippets from La respuesta and a few well-known excerpts from the long philosophical poem, Primero sueñ o.
Here and there an author alludes to a different ('new') text, but by and large, the same limited corpus about which the editors speak in the introduction is the one on which the majority of the volume's essays is based.
Overall, the essayists have striven to express themselves in a mid-range academic language which seems directed at the level of an undergraduate readership or a professor handling a seminar for the MA student. Theoretical and critical concepts are for the most part defined or translated and information is kept basic, because the discourse is meant to be understood by teachers operating outside the privileged Sorjuanine circle. Among many admirable examples, I commend Electa Arenal's 'Sor Juana and Company: Intellectuals and Early Feminists', which identifies the nun with numerous predecessors and contemporaries who, like the nun, might be considered precursors of eighteenth-century encyclopedic rationalism. While not talking down to us, Arenal employs explanatory language for 'lay' readers just delving into the tradition of the scholarly medieval, Renaissance and baroque woman, such as Christine de Pizan, Mary Wollstonecraft and Sor Juana.
Most of the essays in the first of the book's three sections tangentially allude to Sor Juana's 'sisters' across the Atlantic or in convents throughout the viceroyalties of the Americas, but five articles (Arenal, Kirk, Eich, Vollendorf, Harvey) specifically focus on 'other female writers' before and during Sor Juana's career, with whom she 'shared many characteristics' and who, with her, 'participated in a political project that not only engaged the centuries-old debate on the worth of women (known as the querelle des femmes) but also transcended the simplistic pro-and antiwoman rhetoric of the debate' (Vollendorf,95). What Vollendorf, Arenal, et al., accomplish in investigations that view Sor Juana as one among many early modern women who challenge their subordinated position in patriarchal society is to establish an early date for the inception of a widely shared feminist ideology throughout the Americas and the Western world. Statements typifying Sor Juana's positions as 'protofeminist' can now be modified, and the qualifiers relaxed. The women may not have been in collective and contemporaneous contact to discuss a concerted effort to topple, or at least to reform, the patriarchal social, economic and religio-political system incarcerating their intellectual and material gifts, but the numeric and consistent weight of these many women's positions constitute a virtual feminism that awaited the liberation of technology and empowering modes of education, transportation and greater protections under the law.
This book reveals that The Tenth Muse Phenomenon is neither new nor exclusive to the nun of New Spain, but that does not diminish the stunning merit of Sor Juana's work or the importance of her contribution to Latin-American and Western letters; it places her in a wider sphere of influence and tradition. It enlarges the world she strove to improve.
Similarly, there is merit in Stephanie Merrim's attempt to enlarge the literary tradition in which the Tenth Muse wrote, by indicating in the nun's work much more of what Merrim calls the Mexican Archive and not only, almost exclusively, the Western European canon. Although but one of Sor Juana's poems speaks directly about Mexico's spiritual patroness the Virgen de Guadalupe, Merrim, for example, credibly notes that much of the imagery alluding to the nun's all-important and ubiquitous Virgin Mary is the very same poetic language used to describe Guadalupe: the moon at the feet, the crown of stars, the roses, the eagle. Still, one must recall that the self-same imagery appears in the Book of Revelations in the Bible to describe the Virgin, so that imagery can go both ways.
Much mention throughout this Approaches is made to Sor Juana's most important verse work, her metaphysical, existentialist and gnostic poem Primero sueñ o, but only one essay is exclusively devoted to presenting a teaching guide to the work. It is unfortunate that so traditionalist a viewpoint was sought for this important task, as the Sueñ o is of fundamental importance in the nun's overall production and*precisely for the reasons Elias Rivers notes*requires a particularly innovative presentation. On the first page of his essay he categorically closes the door to other possible origins of 'First Dream' than that of a mimicry of Góngora. He then characterizes Sor Juana's poem as 'difficult', a 'problem', a 'struggle' (this word used three times in less than a page), and a 'laborious process'. Who would want to teach, much less study, a text presented so negatively? Primero sueñ o is, indeed, a multifaceted journey that presents a special challenge to diverse levels of students in varied disciplines. But the most productive qualifiers for this ever-renewing, perennially renewed, text, besides 'literary adventure', are 'rich' and 'rewarding' and, perhaps, 'mysterious', one of the classic artistic canon's more useful descriptors. An apt allusion to struggle in Rivers' analysis, however, is to the poem's consistent thematics about defiance and insubordination, true, he suggests, to Sor Juana's career-long challenge to the churchmen who long failed to still her pen (133Á34).
Teachers may find Daniel P. Hunt's piece on 'Sor Juana, or, the Traps of Translation' of special merit. Hunt details practical activities designed to engage students in the unusual (these days) work of close textual analysis*here, the hard labour of straightening out the Since the Mexican Revolution, the need felt by many intellectuals and artists to define Mexican national identity never lost its urgency. In her book, Mexico, From Mestizo to Multicultural, Chorba seeks to examine how novelists, filmmakers, dramatists and cartoonists engage with the question of mexicanidad during the years of Carlos Salinas de Gortari's presidency (1988Á1994). Through the detailed analysis of selected works, Chorba shows how the established notion of mestizo national identity is challenged and gradually displaced by the concepts of multiculturalism and ethnic plurality. Of special interest is the emphasis given to the various, and often contradictory, ideas on Mexico's national identity as promoted by the state, perceived by the public and depicted by artists.
Chapter 1 establishes the historical and ideological framework of the book. It gives a good overview of the most important political events between 1968 and 1994 and delineates briefly their impact on the general public. It also provides the reader with comprehensible and concise definitions of terms such as 'nationalist' and 'identity discourse'. Finally, it highlights how Salinas de Gortari's move away from a mestizophile ideology towards a pluricultural identity was embraced by intellectuals, artists and the public in their demand for more democratization. Chorba's observations are informative and clearly presented so that even non-specialists should find her argument easy to follow.
The following chapters are of a less descriptive and more analytical nature. The texts examined by Chorba are undoubtedly of interest to the debate on Mexico's national identity although some of them were created after Salinas de Gortari's presidency, the main time period Chorba set out to study. Nevertheless, the selected texts are well-chosen examples to illustrate how identity discourse has changed from post-revolutionary to modern times. In Chapter 2, Chorba analyses in great detail the novel Nen, la inú til by Ignacio Solares (1993) and the film La otra conquista (1998), directed by Salvador Carrasco. Both texts revisit the past to reflect on the present. Chorba demonstrates how Solares and Carrasco attempt to overcome the trauma associated with mestizaje by depicting mestizo identity in an idealized light. However, Chorba argues convincingly that even a romanticized take on mestizaje is an outdated concept to explain lo mexicano, or Mexican national identity, at the end of the twentieth century.
In the third chapter of her book, Chorba examines selected works by Carmen Boullosa (Llanto: novelas imposibles [1992]) and Carlos Fuentes (El naranjo, o los círculos del tiempo [1993]). Both authors propose multiculturalism as a more appropriate model to define modern Mexican identity, although Boullosa's outlook is more pessimistic than Fuentes'. As in the previous chapter, Chorba's analysis is thorough and contributes greatly to the understanding of the debate surrounding the difficult process of characterizing Mexican national identity in times of political change.
In the last of the analytical chapters, 'The Interminable Conquest of Mexico', Chorba demonstrates how contemporary artists return to the sixteenth century in their efforts to explore lo mexicano. Both the cartoons of El Ahuizotl (1992), supplement of La Jornada, and Víctor Hugo Rascón Banda's play La Malinche (1998) draw parallels between the sixteenthcentury conquest and the onset of globalization. Chorba emphasizes Mexico's fear of losing its national and cultural identity triggered, amongst other things, by the signing of the NAFTA agreement with the United States. This chapter is of particular interest as very few critics have analysed in such great detail the works of cartoonists such as Magú , Rocha and Ahumada.
Chorba's interdisciplinary study is refreshing and astute, despite a tendency to repeat unnecessarily certain particulars. The book is rich in illustrations and offers solid historical overviews and to the point definitions of terminologies, abbreviations, concepts and ideologies. In that sense, it is an ideal textbook for undergraduate courses which focus on Mexico's national identity but it is also of value to scholars who are working in the field of Mexican culture.

CHARLOTTE LANGE
University of Stirling. This bilingual edition of the 'Locas mujeres' poems by Gabriela Mistral is a welcome addition to the small number of published English translations of the poetry of Latin America's first Nobel Laureate. This is the first time that the sixteen poems which constitute the 'Locas mujeres' section of Mistral's fourth volume of poems, Lagar (1954), have been translated in their entirety. Couch also includes ten poems that were published posthumously. Of these, eight poems are selected from the 'Locas mujeres' section of Lagar II (1991) and two poems are drawn from texts by the Chilean literary critic, Roque Esteban Scarpa, published in 1976 and 1977. Since different versions of the poems published posthumously exist, Couch provides an overview of the sources consulted and his reasons for selecting each version. The hard-bound edition is handsomely presented and poems in the original Spanish face the translated versions, making it easy for the bilingual reader to switch between the two. For those readers approaching Mistral's work for the first time, the introduction to the edition is accessible and helpful in situating the poems within her oeuvre. Some biographical details are included, much of which will be familiar to Mistralian scholars, but Couch rightly warns the newcomer away from the facile use of biographical criticism to read Mistral's poetry, a fate from which her work suffered for many years. I would, however, have liked to see further references to the recent work of scholars who have sought to debunk the myths that have surrounded Mistral, the origins of which Couch traces here.
A brief analysis of the motifs, tropes and technique that recur in the selected poems is also included in the introduction and offers a welcome glimpse into the hauntingly rich poems of Mistral's later years, which have been neglected by critics until recently. Couch introduces the reader to Mistral's prosodic, syntactic and lexical practice in these poems in order to underscore the challenges that they throw up for the translator and to explain briefly his approach. He states that his aim is to remain faithful to the metrical choices employed in the original Spanish, but, following Lawrence Venuti, he acknowledges the perceptible 'foreignizing' that an emphasis on the source language incurs. However, on the whole the translator's guiding rule complements the sense of strangeness, alienation, violence and self-annihilation that lie at the heart of the 'madness' of the women depicted by Mistral.
Endnotes are included for the majority of the poems. These offer further insight into the specific choices made by the translator, a brief contextual outline when appropriate, and an explanation of any differences between the selected version of a poem and other versions published elsewhere or which remained unpublished at the time of Mistral's death in 1957. The translated poems are generally accurate and read well, and I particularly like the way in which they respect the pared, lyrical language employed by Mistral. As noted above, the line lengths, and tonal and rhythmic choices tend to complement the original Spanish, and, importantly, the translator is generally sensitive to Mistral's deliberate ambiguity in relation to the gender of a referent. There are a couple of instances when some words are not, in my opinion, translated as accurately as they could be, such as the rendering of the title of the poem 'La bailarina' as 'The Ballerina', which implies a more formal and rigid form of dance than that suggested by the frenetic shedding of name and identity of the woman dancer in the poem. Nevertheless, Couch's bilingual edition is to be recommended, not least because it advances accessibility to and interest in Mistral's work not just beyond Spanish speakers, but also beyond the usual selection of her early sonnets, cradle songs and 'rondas' to which her work has been reduced for too long.

University of Swansea.
Modernisms and Modernities: Studies in Honor of Donald L. Shaw. Edited, and with an Introduction, by Susan Carvalho. Newark: Juan de la Cuesta. 2006. 352 pp.
Como volumen de conjunto interesa destacar que no hay en estas pá ginas una bú squeda unilateral de una metodología de estudio literario, ni tampoco un favorecimiento a determinadas parcelas o géneros. Susan Carvalho acierta al conjuntar varios trabajos de particular aná lisis textual con otros de contextualización cultural e histórica que recorren desde el Romanticismo hasta la mitad del siglo XX en lo peninsular y desde el Modernismo hasta los albores del siglo XXI en lo que toca a Hispanoamérica.
Los estudios ligados a lo hispanoamericano se amplían aquí al concepto de lo iberoamericano o latinoamericano, con la inclusión de Brasil y el estudio de su 'modernismo' en 1922 a cargo de Stephen Hart. Cronológicamente sigue el trabajo de Marina Martín sobre la lente humorística, y particularmente paródica, en algunos de los relatos de Borges. Elzbieta Sklodowska analiza la complejidad de la cultura haitiana bajo el prisma narrativo de Alejo Carpentier y Antonio Benítez Rojo. La cuestión del llamado 'realismo má gico' y la visión de éste por parte de la crítica europea y estadounidense le permiten a Gustavo Pellón presentar un interesante artículo que invita a la revisión de ciertos conceptos críticos. Por su parte, Raymond Williams se interna en un serio debate en torno a los retos a los que se enfrenta la crítica al tratar de etiquetas como el 'post-boom' o la 'postmodernidad'. El volumen se cierra con tres trabajos má s particulares: el de Sharon Magnarelli sobre una pieza teatral de la mexicana Marcela del Río; el de J. Alyce Cook sobre un relato de la argentina Luisa Valenzuela y, finalmente, otro de Hugo Méndez en torno a la novelística mexicana actual y sus conexiones con la globalización.
Ademá s del generoso y bien merecido homenaje a Donald L. Shaw, lo valioso de este volumen radica en la posibilidad de mostrar y complementar diversos modos de acercarse a la literatura y de entender que la prá ctica textual y la de los estudios culturales, cuando se realizan adecuadamente, ayudan a expandir la visión crítica de los textos y los autores. Quizá sea en ese modo abierto pero riguroso de acercarse a la literatura donde hallamos uno de los mejores legados de Shaw.

ALBERTO ACEREDA
Arizona State University.